Before It's Too Late

by Sara Driscoll

  He lifted his nose, sampling the air, and then trotted down the path in the direction of the power plant. She could tell he didn’t have a scent at this point, but, as far as she was concerned, she was stacking the deck in Michelle’s favor, especially since the teams were well distributed over the length and breadth of the island. If time hasn’t already run out. She pushed that thought away. After one unsuccessful search tonight, she really hoped that she wouldn’t have to comfort her dog a second time.

  Another woman who looked like her might die tonight. Might already be dead. And the thought that the death might be in her stead was too horrifying to contemplate.

  Focus.

  “Find her, Hawk.”

  The dog’s ears pricked, indicating he heard the command, but his stride didn’t waver. They jogged down the hard-packed dirt path lined by thick forest, the leafy canopy blocking out nearly all the moonlight. The beam of Meg’s flashlight lit a ghostly circle on the ground in front of them, dissipating into blackness into the trees.

  The first indication that Hawk had something came with the waving flag of his tail, paired with the slowing of his steps.

  “Got something, buddy? Good boy!” Meg hung back, not wanting to disturb any air currents, waiting with bated breath to see which direction he’d go. She gave a small fist pump of triumph as Hawk cut left, right into the foliage, his head low now, his steps hampered by bushes and jutting tree roots. But he was unmistakably headed toward the abandoned power plant.

  She knew within minutes that he’d lost the scent, but she wasn’t concerned. This was part of his process, especially in a search where she suspected the victim was inside a structure. She quietly encouraged him, doing her best to light his way as he pushed through the forest before them. Suddenly he broke out onto a narrow dirt path, hardly wide enough for either of them single file, but he immediately turned toward the looming bulk of concrete rising above the trees. He had the scent again.

  Meg pulled her radio off her belt. “Meg here. I think we have something. Anyone else?”

  “We’re at the quarry, and nothing so far.” Brian’s voice seemed overloud in the still night air.

  “We’re under the bridge, almost all the way to the edge of the island. Rocco doesn’t have anything,” Lauren reported.

  “Theo neither. We’re just past the oil house. Where are you?” Scott asked.

  Meg ducked and pushed under a low branch. “Coming up on what looks like a fieldstone wall. But beyond it is the power plant.”

  “You called it,” Lauren said. “Want us to come in?”

  “Not until I’ve got better evidence that he’s really onto something. One of the reasons they locked up the power plant was because people used to sit in there and smoke weed at all hours of the night. Let me make sure it’s not a bunch of stoners.”

  “We’ll keep looking then. Lauren out.”

  Scott and Brian signed off and then it was just handler and dog again. Ahead of them, the thick fieldstone wall loomed out of the darkness, the path passing through a low, semicircular opening lined with corrugated metal. Hawk shot right through, but Meg had to bend over double to clear the low ceiling. She scurried through the four-foot channel and then took a moment to take in the moonlit buildings that filled the clearing.

  The larger building to her right was constructed of concrete and rusting steel, the outside walls covered with multicolored graffiti. She remembered coming here years ago with a mechanical-minded friend who explained all about hydroelectric-power generation, and those odd details helped fill in strategic gaps as to possible victim location. The concrete-lined “millrace” carried water from the James River through the plant, where it turned the huge turbine blades, before falling out the front of the plant and back into the James. The turbines were connected to massive generators inside the building that produced electricity. That power was carried through the smaller transformer building beside it and then off to Richmond to power the early twentieth-century streetcar system.

  She closed her eyes, listening for any sound that could indicate a human presence, but there was nothing. Opening her eyes, she spotted Hawk, fifteen feet ahead and moving faster and faster as he arrowed straight for the gated entrance. She sprinted to catch up to him. Years ago, when she’d last been inside this building, this had been an open doorway, but metal bars now covered all the windows and formed the metal gate. A thick, dull silver chain was wrapped between the gate and the grating, which made up a section of the wall. With a gasp, Meg realized the ends dangled free and the padlock, which normally locked the entrance, lay on the ground below, the heavy U-shaped shackle cut in half.

  He knew to come with bolt cutters. This is it.

  Hawk stood at her knee and whined as she pulled off the chain and draped it over the iron bars, in case there was any evidence to be recovered. She yanked open the metal gate, with an ear-piercing squeal, and Hawk was through the moment the gap was wide enough. Meg stepped into the huge, cavernous space—three stories overhead and lit by moonlight flowing through the barred windows to fall on the floor at her feet. Using her flashlight, she made quick work of her initial search, her light bouncing off colorful graffiti, iron barred windows, and three massive concrete pads that once supported the generators. Opposite the footings, three heavily riveted concave steel semicircles, each easily eight feet across, protruded into the space beyond. Hawk made a beeline for the nearest steel circle, and as Meg trained her light on him, she saw that where the other two massive steel circles were sealed, this one was missing the middle steel plate that should have enclosed the center two feet of the dome. Hawk went right to it, jumping up onto the built-in platform, which was part of the structure, and stuck his head into the void beyond. Pulling back, he gave two piercing barks, the sound echoing off the bare walls and high ceiling of the generation room.

  “Good boy. Out of the way a second.” Meg gave Hawk a gentle push to the side of the platform and knelt on it herself. She leaned her upper body through the gap, leading with her flashlight. The room on the other side was only a third of the width of the building, but it had the same empty height above. Meg trained her light on the floor below. And that’s when she saw her.

  The woman was a little older than Meg, and carried a few more pounds, but her long, straight black hair was pulled back into a braid to reveal the gag that sunk between her lips. She sat on the edge of the steel-lined concrete pad that had once housed the turbine, her legs dangling down into the void below, where the turbine blades would have spun in the water passing through. Her hands were tied behind her back and then strapped to a metal pole behind her, high enough to force her shoulders nearly down to her knees.

  She wasn’t moving.

  “Ma’am! Ma’am, can you hear me? I’m with the FBI.”

  Nothing.

  Meg couldn’t tell if she was unconscious or dead. She pulled back through the hole and ripped her radio off her belt. “It’s Meg. I’m in the power plant and I’ve got her. I need more hands and I need 911. I can’t get to her yet, so I don’t know her status, but get a medical team here now in case she’s still with us.”

  “I’ll call for help.” Lauren’s voice was crisp and calm.

  Both Brian and Scott reported they’d be there right away and Meg signed off. She wriggled out of her SAR pack, knowing she’d have trouble getting through the gap with it on. She pushed it through the hole and lowered it down onto the concrete platform below; then she turned to her dog. “Hawk, stay. I’ll be right back.” Gripping the narrow metal sill around the opening, she swung both legs in and wriggled through and down to concrete.

  The turbine pad was in the middle of the room, but was surrounded by dark, murky water. Meg couldn’t tell how deep it was, as her flashlight only bounced off the surface. She eyed the four-foot gap between the narrow pad and the platform on which she stood.

  She’d have to jump it. And she’d have to stick the landing or she’d end up in the turbine shaft, and who knew how deep that was?


  She put her pack back on, backed as close to the wall as she could, pushed off in a single step, and leapt across the flooded space. She only had about eighteen inches to land on, but managed to not only land, but also to catch her balance and keep herself from tumbling forward. Already sliding out of her pack and ripping it open in the search for her spring-loaded military knife, Meg rushed to the woman. Even as she pushed the button for the blade to pop free, she was laying a hand on the woman’s cheek.

  Chilly, but that could be from exposure rather than from death. Maybe they weren’t too late after all.

  Meg put down her flashlight and sawed at the cords binding her hands. Once released, they fell limply to her sides and the victim slumped sideways. But Meg was ready for her and smoothly rolled her onto her back, pulling her legs out of the shaft to lay out prone.

  Bending over, she yanked down the gag and pressed an ear to the woman’s mouth. No breath sounds. But two fingers pressed to the pulse at her throat rewarded Meg with what she hoped wasn’t an imagined weak pulse. Quickly lacing her fingers together, she planted them over the woman’s sternum and started CPR.

  She heard her name being bellowed through the hole into the adjoining room. Brian was here.

  “In here! Look through the hole into the next room.” She looked over when a beam of light struck her, blinking until he lowered the light a bit with the command to Lacey to stay. He clambered through the hole and made the jump over to her, hurrying around the far side of the gaping hole to kneel at her side.

  “She’s alive?”

  “Faint pulse. She’s been here for days and is dehydrated at the very least. And we don’t know what else he might have done to her. Ambulance coming?”

  “Yes.”

  They both looked up to find Lauren leaning in through the hole in the wall.

  “We need to keep her going until they get here. We’re not in the easiest place to reach.”

  “We will.” Brian nudged Meg over a bit. “Let me take over. We’re going to be at this for a while, I suspect, so we’ll do best spelling each other off.”

  They made the switch without missing a beat, and Meg sat back, letting her hands fall into her lap, saving strength for when Brian needed a break.

  “You okay?”

  Meg looked up to Brian’s serious gaze as he bobbed up and down with the compressions. “It’s better than it could have been. Honestly, the chances of finding her alive were small. If she’d been buried alive like Sandy Holmes . . .”

  “She would have been long dead. I hear you. But he just had her tied up here? I don’t get it. If we’d found the note right away, what would be the big deal?”

  “I’m not sure, but maybe it’s too early to see the pattern yet.” She glanced back to where Lauren still watched them, Hawk’s head pushed under her arm to keep his eye on her as well. She turned back to Brian. “I’ll tell you what I don’t like—that this was guesswork. What if the CRRU was wrong? They’re lucky they hit on Michelle’s background so quickly, but this was never a sure thing. We need better intel if we’re going to keep doing this.”

  “But how? You know they’re doing their best.”

  “I know. But I’m afraid next time, the best simply isn’t going to cut it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Strategic Planning: The process of defining a strategy and allocating personnel and resources to achieve specific goals.

  Tuesday, May 23, 3:52 PM

  Forensic Canine Unit, J. Edgar Hoover Building

  Washington, DC

  “Didn’t Craig say three-thirty?” Brian tapped his cell phone, the time prominently displayed in stark white numerals on a black background. “You think he forgot?”

  Lauren looked up from where she sat at her desk, Rocco tucked into the space around her feet. “Not a chance in hell.”

  “He’s probably in a meeting himself,” Scott said. “Maybe Peters needed to see him about last night.” Executive Assistant Director Adam Peters was the head of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, which oversaw the Criminal Investigative, Cyber, and International Operations Divisions, as well as the Critical Incident Response Group, which included the Forensic Canine Unit.

  “He could be talking to the hospital to get an update on Michelle,” Lauren said. “A coma . . . What happened there that we don’t know about? I know she wasn’t breathing when you got there, but she didn’t seem outwardly injured.”

  “We don’t know how long she wasn’t breathing. And we don’t know if he drugged her or hurt her in ways we couldn’t easily see.” Meg leaned back in her chair, feeling like she’d been hit by a Mack truck. The scant few hours of sleep she managed left her feeling exhausted, and the news first thing that morning that Michelle had never regained consciousness at the hospital had been an unexpected further blow. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. One dead victim, and one close to death who might not pull through. Discouragement rode her like a physical weight. Perp, 2. FBI, 0. She gave herself a mental head shake and pulled herself back into the conversation. “Craig may be down with the investigative boys to pump them for answers so we know what we’re looking at.”

  “That’s exactly where I was.”

  All four handlers swung toward the bull pen door, where Craig stood in his usual uniform of a suit and tie. Not an actual handler himself, Craig always dressed to the nines.

  “You were down in CID?” Meg asked.

  “I’ve been everywhere today. I’ve talked to the cryptanalysts in the CRRU about the code, been down to Evidence Response to find out where we are with scene processing, and I’ve even had a quick word with SSA Rutherford from the BAU.”

  Eyebrows rose at the mention of the Behavioral Analysis Unit—the FBI’s criminal profilers—but the team waited for Craig to elaborate.

  Craig came into the room, shrugging out of his suit jacket and laying it neatly across an unused desk, before he grabbed a spare chair and rolled it up to the group. Hawk raised his head, tilting his nose up to Craig in greeting. “Hey, buddy, good job last night.” He ran one large hand down Hawk’s back.

  “Every time I think Hawk can’t surprise me anymore, he does something like find a victim four feet underground in a box.” Meg smiled down at her dog, the only thing that lightened her soul in the midst of this case. “Or inside a room with minimal air flow.”

  “He has a damned fine nose.” Craig sat back in the chair. “Now, before we start, because I know it will be your first concern, let me tell you that I just talked to the charge nurse for Michelle Wilson and there’s no change in her condition. I have more information on what happened to her, but let’s do this stepwise and break down what happened yesterday, starting with victim selection in the order they came to us. First was Sandy Holmes. Ms. Holmes was ex-military. She served with the marines in Iraq in 2012.”

  “They let women do that back then?” Scott asked. “I thought women in service weren’t allowed in Iraq at that time.”

  “Not on the front lines. But they needed service women working the checkpoints. They’d do body searches of any women and girls going through, looking for explosives, since anyone could be a suicide bomber by that time.”

  “Dangerous job,” Lauren commented.

  “That wasn’t the hard part of their day, from what I understand. The men working the checkpoint could hunker down and sleep there overnight, but the women had to be ferried back and forth daily between the checkpoint and their bunker. That made them a predictable target. One morning, on the way in, their convoy was hit by a suicide bomber. He rammed his explosives-packed car into the first armored vehicle in the convoy. Everyone in that vehicle died in the explosion. Ms. Holmes was in the second vehicle and sustained some pretty significant injuries. Got an honorable medical discharge and came home to recuperate. She healed physically, but suffered from severe episodes of post-traumatic stress disorder. So she got herself a PTSD service dog named Ruby. From what agents learned, Ruby could stave off a panic attack simp
ly by her presence. When things started getting bumpy, Ruby would be right there and would calm Ms. Holmes down. She never went anywhere without her dog.”

  “So Ruby being found on her own yesterday really was a red flag.” Meg reached for the coffee mug on her desk. “Do we have any idea how the perp separated Ms. Holmes from her dog? It doesn’t sound like something she would have done willingly.”

  “We don’t have anything there yet,” Craig replied. “Ms. Holmes and Ruby were walking in Glencarlyn Park near their home. They were seen there often, and we’ve got witnesses corroborating their presence there last night, around seven-thirty.”

  “Just as dusk was falling,” Lauren said. “And I know that park. Off-leash spaces for dogs, but also lots of forest area and a creek. Multiple access points to a road or vehicle. And it connects to Lubber Run, to the north, so she could have been picked up there as well. Who knows how far Ruby ran on her own before she was found?”

  “Exactly. Agents will be out there again tonight, canvassing to try to catch a few more who might have been there last night at the same time, so that’s still evolving. Related and also ongoing is the autopsy. I’ve got some very preliminary results. The victim died from oxygen deprivation in a small space, but there were signs of trauma while still alive. The problem is, it’s difficult to tell what was a result of her struggle to free herself and what happened during her capture. What was undoubtedly from her capture is the small needle mark inside her left elbow.”